James Dickey - Deliverance

After two hours from the time the heron left us we had drunk all the beer we had. The sun was eating my bald spot, and my nylon outfit was soaking with me. My tongue began to balloon in my mouth, and my backbone was splintering through the skin; I kept touching it between strokes to see if anything had given way. The edge of the seat was digging into my right thigh, for that was the only position in which I could get a good grip on the river. All the pains began to try to link up with each other and there was nothing I could do about it.

I looked back. The other canoe was just coming around. Lewis had lagged behind us because, I suppose, he wanted us in sight in case we got into trouble. Anyway, they were about half a mile back and disappeared as we rounded another curve, and I pointed with my paddle to the left bank. I didn’t know whether they saw me or not, but I figured to flag them in when they came by. I wanted to lie up in the shade and rest for a while. I was hungry, and I sure would’ve liked to have had another beer. We dug in and swung over.

As we closed in on the left bank, a pouring sound came from under the trees; the leaves at a certain place moved as if in a little wind. The fresh green-white of a creek was frothing into the river. We sailed past it half-broadside and came to the bank about seventy-five yards downstream. I put the nose against it and paddled hard to hold it there while Bobby got out and moored us.

“This is too much like work,” Bobby said, as be gave me a hand up.

“Lord, Lord,” I said. “I’m getting too old for this kind of business. I suppose you could call it learning the hard way.”

Bobby sat down on the ground and untied a handkerchief from around his neck. He leaned down to the river and sopped it, then swabbed his face and neck down, rubbing a long time in the nose area. I bent over and touched my toes a couple of times to get rid of the position that had been maiming my back, and then looked upstream. I still couldn’t see the other canoe. I turned to say something to Bobby.

Two men stepped out of the woods, one of them trailing a shotgun by the barrel.

Bobby had no notion they were there until he looked at me. Then he turned his head until he could see over his shoulder and got up, brushing at himself.

“How goes it?” he said.

One of them, the taller one, narrowed in the eyes and face. They came forward, moving in a kind of half circle as though they were stepping around something. The shorter one was older, with big white eyes and a half-white stubble that grew in whorls on his cheeks. His face seemed to spin in many directions. He had on overalls, and his stomach looked like it was falling through them. The other was lean and tall, and peered as though out of a cave or some dim simple place far back in his yellow-tinged eyeballs. When he moved his jaws the lower bone came up too far for him to have teeth. “Escaped convicts” flashed up in my mind on one side, “Bootleggers” on the other. But they still could have been hunting.

They came on, and were ridiculously close for some reason. I tried not to give ground; some principle may have been involved.

The older one, looming and spinning his sick-looking face in front of me, said, “What the hail you think you’re doin’?”

“Going downriver. Been going since yesterday.”

I hoped that the fact that we were at least talking to each other would do some good of some kind.

He looked at the tall man; either something or nothing was passing between them. I could not feel Bobby anywhere near, and the other canoe was not in sight. I shrank to my own true size, a physical movement known only to me, and with the strain my solar plexus failed. I said, “We started from Oree yesterday afternoon, and we hope we can get to Aintry sometime late today or early tomorrow.”

“Aintry?”

Bobby said, and I could have killed him, “Sure. This river just runs one way, cap’n. Haven’t you heard?”

“You ain’t never going to get down to Aintry,” he said, without any emphasis on any word.

“Why not?” I asked, seared but also curious; in a strange way it was interesting to cause him to explain.

“Because this river don’t go to Aintry,” he said. “You done taken a wrong turn somewhere. This-here river don’t go nowhere near Aintry.”

“Where does it go?”

“It goes … it goes …”

“It goes to Circle Gap,” the other man said, missing his teeth and not caring. “‘Bout fifty miles.”

“Boy,” said the whorl-faced man, “You don’t know where you are.”

“Well,” I said, “We’re going where the river’s going. Well come out somewhere, I reckon.”

The other man moved closer to Bobby.

“Hell,” I said, “we don’t have anything to do with you. We sure don’t want any trouble. If you’ve got a still near here, that’s fine with us. We could never tell anybody where it is, because you know something? You’re right. We don’t know where we are.”

“A stee-ul?” the tall man said, and seemed honestly surprised.

“Sure,” I said. “If you’re making whiskey, well buy some from you. We could sure use it.”

The drop-gutted man faced me squarely. “Do you know what the hail you’re talkin’ about?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“You done said something about makin’ whiskey. You think we’re makin’ whiskey. Now come on. Ain’t that right?”

“Shit,” I said. “I don’t know whether you’re making whiskey or hunting or rambling around in the woods for your whole fucking life. I don’t know and I don’t care what you’re doing. It’s not any of my business.”

I looked at the river, but we were a little back from the bank, and I couldn’t see the other canoe. I didn’t think it could have gone past, but I was not really sure that it hadn’t. I shook my head in a complete void, at the thought that it might have; we had got too far ahead, maybe.

With the greatest effort in the world, I came back into the man’s face and tried to cope with it. He had noticed something about the way I had looked at the river.

“Anybody else with you?” he asked me.

I swallowed and thought, with possibilities shooting through each other. If I said yes, and they meant trouble, we would bring Lewis and Drew into it with no defenses. Or it might mean that we would be left alone, four being too many to handle. On the other hand, if I said no, then Lewis and Drew—especially Lewis—might be able to … well, to do something. Lewis’ pectorals loomed up in my mind, and his leg, with the veins bulging out of the divided muscles of his thigh, his leg under water wavering small-ankled and massive as a centaur’s. I would go with that.

“No,” I said, and took a couple of steps inland to draw them away from the river.

The lean man reached over and touched Bobby’s arm, feeling it with strange delicacy. Bobby jerked back, and when he did the gun barrel came up, almost casually but decisively.

“We’d better get on with it,” I said. “We got a long ways to go.” I took part of a step toward the canoe.

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” the man in front of me said, and leveled the shotgun straight into my chest. My heart quailed away from the blast tamped into both barrels, and I wondered what the barrel openings would look like at the exact instant they went off: if fire would come out of them, or if they would just be a gray blur or if they would change at all between the time you lived and died, blown in half. He took a turn around his hand with the string he used for a trigger.

“You come on back in here ‘less you want your guts all over this-here woods.”

I half-raised my hands like a character in a movie. Bobby looked at me, but I was helpless, my bladder quavering. I stepped forward into the woods through some big bushes that I saw but didn’t feel. They were all behind me.